Trumka to Launch Jobs Initiative Tomorrow
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Tomorrow morning, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will announce a major new initiative to create and save jobs.
(Watch the live webcast at www.aflcio.org/createjobs starting at 9 a.m.)
Trumka will be part of a noted panel in “Spotlight on the Jobs Crisis” at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
With unemployment at its highest rate in more than 20 years, Trumka says America needs bold, quick action to put people back to work, in addition to longer term, structural fixes for our economy. The AFL-CIO initiative he announces will include calls to extend help for the unemployed, rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, provide aid to struggling states and communities, create federally funded community-based jobs and increase lending to small and medium-sized businesses to spur job creation.
U.S. Jobless Rate Shocking: 15.7 Million Workers Unemployed
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Stunningly bad news on the nation’s jobless rate today: Unemployment worsened in October to 10.2 percent, a huge jump from 9.8 percent in September. That’s 15.7 million jobless workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Worse, the unemployment and underemployment rate is a shocking 17.5 percent—more than 27 million American workers without full-time jobs.
The construction, manufacturing and retail industries had the biggest losses, with 62,000 construction jobs lost in October, 61,000 in manufacturing and 40,000 in retail. Health care and temporary employment were the only bright spots, with health care jobs increasing by 29,000 and temp jobs by 44,000.
More Unemployed Workers, Fewer Jobs
The U.S. retail sector has been the most immune to the nation’s year-long jobs free fall, but that has changed in recent months and likely will get much worse. Today’s Commerce Department report on retail sales in December, the period when most retailers make a large chunk of their earnings, are bleak: Sales were down 9.8 percent in December from December 2007. These figures mean many stores will be closed and entire chains going bankrupt—and many more U.S. workers will lose their jobs.
Already, there now are four unemployed workers for every job opening, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). The nonprofit group also reports a 90 percent growth of involuntary part-time workers over the past year, with some 8 million U.S. workers forced to settle for fewer hours. Such workers are not counted in the official monthly Labor Department unemployment data, meaning the official U.S. unemployment of 7.2 percent is more like 13.5 percent when underemployed or workers too discouraged to look for work are counted.
